It has been a year since we focused here on the theoretical leitmotifs of documenta 12. A year in which questions pertaining to modernity, the status of the subject and education have experienced sometimes dramatic displacements. Since then, numerous contributions to the documenta 12 magazine project have been published here, whilst conversely efforts have also been made to engage in exchanges with other publications involved in the project.
The aim here is to present an interim inventory of this multi-channel communication, along with an updated cross-section from the magazines from all over the world. In the process »Journal World« is also pursuing specific motifs in its own capacity, as was envisaged from the outset in the open pool of the magazine project with its multiple branches. The question of publishing for example crops up in several different contexts, in which freedom of opinion is not always a defining characteristic. The article outlining the online media situation in South-east Asia (Keiko Sei) reveals the kind of contributions that critical cultural journals can make to a more broad-based and durable democratisation process. In the essay on the magazine landscape in Turkey (Süreyyya Evren) it becomes evident looking back how many diverse stages self-organised publishing has passed through in the scarcely twenty years in which »contemporary art« has been on the agenda there.
A type of sub-motif that constantly runs through the most diverse contexts for magazines and journals, without being singled out as a specific distinct topic, relates to the current configuration of how feminism is tied into practice. Three insights shedding light on this highly context-sensitive discussion, which is pursued on a very unequal basis when one considers the global context, are portrayed here: first of all a contribution to the debate on the fashion in veils in a primarily Muslim country such as Indonesia (Nuraini Juliastuti), which by no manner of means stems solely from a despotic form of Islam; a sociographic reflection on the situation of working women in North Korea (Gwi-ok Kim), a rare example of a precise detailed reportage of this kind from that country; and finally a media analysis of the depiction of »suffering women« in Algeria (Ghania Mouffok), where it seems as if a threshold has been crossed, meaning women are finally perceived in the singular as individual subjects.
»Journal World« moves still further beyond simply consolidating such related motifs stemming from far-flung magazines. It becomes clear in the in-depth study of an artwork in public space in the Cameroonian city of Douala (Christian Hanussek) how many subtle social fracture lines can sometimes be identified via one single work. Social diversity as an irreversible complex is ultimately also the challenge that continues to pose decisive questions for art production in tune with our times (Marco Scotini).
Finally, »Journal World« considers very personal world journals, be it the excerpts presented here from filmmaker Chris Marker’s archive, which now spans five decades, or the oeuvre of Slovakian conceptualist Juliús Koller, who died in August this year and whose singular artistic world view we would like to call to mind emphatically once again here.